One Brave Gen X Joins The Tradwife Debate

It's me - I am the brave Gen X... Allow me to introduce you to Tradwifery's two fiercest, most glam, most wildly popular and most divisive proponents...

It’s Women’s Day in South Africa so unofficially I should be putting my feet up and watching the Simone Biles documentary, while being fed peeled grapes by Italian swimmer Tomas Ceccon, wearing one of Tom Daley’s oversized handmade knits.

Sorry – did I just let you in on my most up-to-the-minute Olympics fantasy? Alas. It also entirely never going to happen. Not even the ‘Women’s Day feet up’ bits because… yawn and also sob and, more especially also EYE ROLL, I foolishly decided (back when it was still fashionable to do so!) to be one of those Women Who Do It All.

Spoiler alert: what a forking idiot!

Women Who Do It All are from a particular moment in time. We grew up watching ball-busting dames like Sue-Ellen Ewing on Dallas and Alexis Carrington on Dynasty. By our formative, early working years, we never missed an episode of Friends and we drank bottomless Cosmopolitans with our girlfriends a la Sex And The City. At no point were we aspiring to be making our own bread and gambolling through the hinterlands with our bevy of gingham-checked children. I meannnn, Carrie would never! Let alone Samantha! Even Charlotte would have balked - and she was defs the most #tradwife of that quartet.

Tiktok is trending with #tradwives – which is not to be confused with stay at home moms. I’ll get back to this bit. It’s confusing for us Gen X Gang because we thought our great grannies had chained themselves to the fences so that we could work in an office instead of baking bread and wearing a bra every day. Now Gen Z is saying: “not so fast, tannies, maybe we want to bake bread while wearing hot mama outfits.”

Forgive me, trad wives, I kinda get it. I just can’t reallllly get it, because I was sold the whole ‘woman must do it all’ shtick - while holding down brilliant careers, successful marriages and independent-minded children who will eat anything 😏 If we felt meh, we skipped breakfast. If we felt pissed off, we smoked a ciggie. If we felt fat, we got a tan. No one is claiming it to be a health plan! It is just what it was.

So, imagine my surprise when the aspirational and most discussed figures on Tiktok RN are the ones making Coca Cola and chewing gum from scratch in a designer cocktail frock and full slap for their husband and children and all of The Internet. No Woolies ready meals or 9-5 required. Also: zero hyperbole in this last sentence, the tradwives are gorgeous, married, young, awash in children, living on tracts of rural land and majorly organic in a corn-fed perfection kinda way. We would have called them Stepford Wives. That would make us v. bitchy in 2024 Land.

PS Please click those links - she really does make Coca Cola and gum.

Quick check-in on stay-at-home moms versus tradwives… The stay-at-home moms that I know are always happy to curl up for a goss’ over a bottle of wine, feed their kids a takeaway pizza and hang out in their workout clothes for hours after their barre class ended. Even though they are stay at home moms that are not Tiktok’s tradwives, who are a breed of unbridled perfection.

What gives? When did the zeitgeist shift? I ask this on Women’s Day. And I welcome you to its two fiercest and most free-range proponents… Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman.

Nara Smith is (you know I LOVE a South African connecky) a 22-year-old Bloemfontein-born, German-raised model who now lives in Texas with her husband - the original 00s male supermodel Lucky Blue Smith – and their three children. And nine million Tiktok followers. The version of motherhood she presents, as GQ puts it in their recent cover story, is: “calm, impeccably groomed, model-thin, and luxurious. And filled with vast expanses of time in which to make sandwiches.”

“When I asked my toddlers what they wanted for lunch,” Nara Smith narrates in a breathy, ASMR voice, “they both said they wanted a grilled cheese. So that’s exactly what I got started on.” Deadpan. She then proceeds to make the bread, the butter and the cheese. From scratch. The dough alone needed two hours to rise, so you get that these are not quick fixes. She also whips up everything in designer cocktail wear. Her first majorly viral video for PB&J earlier this year was shot in a silky nightgown gown with feathered bell sleeves. She obvs made the bread, the peanut butter and the jam.

There’s also Hannah Neeleman. She is the 34-year-old, Juilliard-trained ballerina turned homemaker and mother of eight. She creates content under the moniker Ballerina Farm – geddit? – and boasts ten million followers on Instagram. While Nara Smith is in the influencer biz – she recently collaborated with Marc Jacobs on the launch of his new tote bag – much of Hannah’s content also pushes Ballerina Farm, the business, where you can buy luxe fresh produce and merch along the lines of Babylonstoren’s designer organic farm-to-table boxes.

Hannah and Ballerina Farm have been in the glare of the spotlight recently after a Brit newspaper interviewed her in situ, while giving the angle of the piece a distinctly ‘blink twice if you need help’ vibe. Which I get, but also is a leeeetle unfair considering she describes herself as ‘mother, wife and co-CEO’. She’s clearly not living in backwaters of Utah under duress. And - as an aside - she competed in Mrs World 12 days after having a baby, so - again - I’d say Mz Hannah is more that a little, erm, goal-orientated. There’s no denying that her content and her tradwife angle is raking in dollars for their farm biz and the family in general.

The tradwives have opened up major debate online… From the ‘WTF was feminism for if we’re right back in the kitchen, baking bread in breathless voice, in our knickers, with three children at our feet’ brigade to the ‘feminism can be anything and everything a woman wants it to be in 2024’. And while I am no tradwife (I know, I know, don’t all roar with hysterical laughter, ‘tis no surprise!) this is a take that I can completely get behind.

So, here we go… Happy Women’s Day 🎉 I hope someone, somewhere, is busy whipping up a brekkie for you with eggs laid by your own chickens, bread fostered from your own Mother (dough not DNA) and OJ hand-squeezed from your own citrus orchard. If all else fails, I’ll be picking up my Woolies flat white as usual so find me there for a commemorative (and celebratory!) eye roll.

In other news, I would 100% win an Olympic gold for eye-rolling.